When screenwriter William Stadiem met Elizabeth Taylor in the mid-’80s to discuss the film he’d be writing for her, “Young Toscanini,” the 50-something legend was already regarded as a joke, especially after John Belushi’s scathing fried-chicken-munching portrayal of her on “Saturday Night Live.”

Eagar to therefore come back hot and strong, the Taylor who met Stadiem in “a tiny bathing suit” was fit and trim, greeting him with, “I would normally do this in the nude, but I don’t know you well enough — yet.”

But never one to leave an audience wanting, Taylor did drop the top of her suit, asking the stunned writer, “What do you think of my body?”

“Moneywood” tells of Hollywood’s 1980s excesses, when the movie world became as much about box-office grosses as the actors and stories themselves.

While the book can feel overstuffed — a new mogul is seemingly introduced on almost every page — Stadiem’s knowledge of filmdom’s glamour town produces juicy tidbits about studio heads and superstars alike.

The section on Eddie Murphy reveals how, at the peak of his “SNL”-driven fame, Murphy’s ever-present entourage included his uncle Ray, who would prowl nightclubs “armed with a sheath of ‘contracts’ to appear in Murphy films” in order to lure young nubiles into his nephew’s bed as well as his own.

Murphy himself attracted women by the boatload, but only a certain sort made the cut. “He wanted more than mere beauty; he wanted perfect, tiny feet,” Stadiem writes. “He would have loved imperial China. If a woman’s feet were wrong, out she would go.”

Murphy’s peculiarities weren’t limited to the bedroom. When he rented a mansion in Benedict Canyon not far from the site of the Manson murders, he demanded that his then-manager, Bob Wachs, perform an exorcism on the house. Wachs “hired a priest and nuns, armed with holy water and other tools of the trade, who said their prayers and sprayed their incense. ‘It’s done,’ Wachs told Murphy, and only then did Murphy assent to moving in.”

Stadiem enjoys outing the peccadilloes of power players, even if their connection to Hollywood is tenuous. We learn that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger secured some hot dates due not to his charm, intellect or power, but a secret deal between the powerful Hollywood “date” procurer Madame Claude and the CIA, which was hoping to “bolster his confidence during the Paris peace talks.” Kissinger was unaware of the arrangement.

But Hollywood’s true insiders provide the author with more than enough dirt.

Uber-producer Don Simpson, known to his favorite madam as “Beverly Hills C – – -” (after the similarly titled Murphy hit that he produced), was so enmeshed in sleaze that when an aspiring producer asked for advice, the most essential wisdom Simpson could bestow was how to get actresses on the casting couch.

The section on power-producer and longtime Barbra Streisand boyfriend Jon Peters — who, when producing the Streisand vehicle “Nuts” about a murderous prostitute, brought the actress/singer to a popular bordello to learn the trade from the working girls — is one of the more fascinating, it turns out, because Stadiem had worked with Peters on a memoir that never came to pass.

Peters, producer of such hits as “Flashdance,” “Rain Man,” and the first Tim Burton “Batman,” was physically abused by his step-father as a child. His also-abused mother abandoned him first to reform school, then to a gay hairdresser couple who turned out, according to Stadiem, to be child molesters. While learning to defend, and fend for, himself, Peters became an expert brawler.

He wound up sleeping in the streets, and while he famously became a hairdresser himself, he started as “a pubic hair colorist and coiffeur . . . catering to strippers.”

As he later rose through Hollywood’s ranks, his scuffling expertise played a key role. Peters — who, Stadiem writes, achieved his success despite never having learned to read or write (he’d assemble groups of actors to read scripts to him) — wed his first wife, actress Lesley Ann Warren, after physically defending her from an abusive boyfriend.

The marriage hit a bump when Peters discovered Warren naked in bed with Warren Beatty, an incident Peters ensured was never repeated by threatening Beatty with what Stadiem calls “reform school justice.”

The producer dispensed similar justice throughout his career. After both Warren and Streisand shared that uber-producer Ray Stark (“The Goodbye Girl,” “Steel Magnolias”) had taken advantage of them as young actresses, Peters “picked up the mini-monster and spun him around as if he were a Howdy Doody puppet.”

Later, Peters placed the future Madonna hit “Crazy for You” in his 1985 flop “Vision Quest.” When he learned that Warner Bros., not wanting to associate their new star with his turkey, was removing the song from the film’s soundtrack, he stormed the company’s headquarters, tore the door off of one executive’s office and threatened him with violence, eventually getting his way.

And when Barry Diller, no shrinking violet himself, mocked Peters’ 1981 failure “Endless Love” at a party, Peters “bitch-slapped” the mogul, earning cheers from those around him.

But not all of Peters’ victories were violent — some were just cunning. When he first met with studio head David Begelman to negotiate a production contract, he greeted him with, “So, how’s Winkie,” having learned from certain call-girl associates that Begelman chose to use that name for his penis.